Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 159

Chernobyl 1.5: "What Is the Cost of Lies?": Chernobyl and Trump

Chernobyl 1.5, the finale of this crucially instructive docudrama, ended with the last words we heard from Legasov's recording: "What is the cost of lies?"

But it's a question that could be put to Donald Trump, and his constant assault on the truth from The White House.   And that makes Chernobyl not only a cautionary true story on the hazards of nuclear energy, but, just as importantly, on the dangers of suppressing the truth, whether on behalf of misguided state such as in the Soviet Union, or unbridled personal ego as with Donald Trump.

The truth that the Soviets suppressed led to the final straw that broke the nuclear reactor and made it explode: the tips of the rods that were meant, when inserted, to be the failsafe of a nuclear explosion in fact had just the opposite effect.  They made the reactor explode.   The Soviets knew this before Chernobyl, but kept it secret out of fear of seeming ignorant or incompetent about nuclear energy.  Which was in fact exactly what they were.   And then the Soviet regime tried to stop Legasov (given an Emmy-worthy performance by Jared Harris) from letting the world know about this.  (And speaking of Emmy-worthy, the same eminently applies to whole series - hats off to creator Craig Mazin.)

According to Gorbachev, it was Chernobyl that brought the Soviet Union down, the blatant example it gave of the arrogance and blindness of the Soviet regime.   There were many other reasons that the Soviet regime deserved to fail.  It's tragic, however, that what brought it down was the death of so many innocent people.

We here in the United States who value freedom can only hope that it takes something far less costly - either impeachment and conviction, or loss of the next Presidential election - to bring down the liar in The White House.

See also: Chernobyl 1.1: The Errors of Arrogance ... Chernobyl 1.2: The Horror Movie ... Chernobyl 1.3: The Reasons ... Chernobyl 1.4 Bio-Robots



 
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Bad Blood 2: A Different Kind of Mob Story

Bad Blood is back with its second streaming season on Netflix.   My wife and I binged and liked it better than the first, which we liked a lot.

The reason: Kim Coates' Declan gets a lot more time, as the mob boss who has trust only in himself.  This was actually the essence of the first season, but we didn't learn that until the very end, when Declan has wiped out everyone around him, including the boss and the boss's patriarch father, in Declan's climb to power.

In the second season, Declan has all the power, but he amasses enemies when he refuses to work for the Italians who have an international drug trade, expanding now to include the powerful and deadly fentanyl.   Declan now needs allies, but his possibilities, ranging from bikers and another local mafia mob, are also being wooed, threatened, paid off, and seduced by the international group, who have sent a pair of ruthless twins, female and male, to Montreal to make sure they get their way.

As with first season, no one is safe when the tensions heat up into war, and bullets start flying.  As with the first season, you'll be surprised about who is left standing and who isn't.   Indeed, what makes Bad Blood different from any other television mob series are the number of major players who get wiped out each season.  So many met this fate in the first season, that, other than Declan, we're treated to an almost entirely different cast of characters.  And they're so well played, we barely miss the characters from season one.

Coates does a great job, again, as Declan.  He has an expressive face, and a voice that does it just the right with intonations and inflections in every scene he's in, as a player and a voice-over narrator.  It's not easy to be original in a mob story, it's such well trodden ground, but Bad Blood 2 amply does that and his highly recommended.

See also Bad Blood: New Mob

 
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Bad Blue 2: A Different Kind of Mob Story

Bad Blood is back with its second streaming season on Netflix.   My wife and I binged and liked it better than the first, which we liked a lot.

The reason: Kim Coates' Declan gets a lot more time, as the mob boss who has trust only in himself.  This was actually the essence of the first season, but we didn't learn that until the very end, when Declan has wiped out everyone around him, including the boss and the boss's patriarch father, in Declan's climb to power.

In the second season, Declan has all the power, but he amasses enemies when he refuses to work for the Italians who have an international drug trade, expanding now to include the powerful and deadly fentanyl.   Declan now needs allies, but his possibilities, ranging from bikers and another local mafia mob, are also being wooed, threatened, paid off, and seduced by the international group, who have sent a pair of ruthless twins, female and male, to Montreal to make sure they get their way.

As with first season, no one is safe when the tensions heat up into war, and bullets start flying.  As with the first season, you'll be surprised about who is left standing and who isn't.   Indeed, what makes Bad Blood different from any other television mob series are the number of major players who get wiped out each season.  So many met this fate in the first season, that, other than Declan, we're treated to an almost entirely different cast of characters.  And they're so well played, we barely miss the characters from season one.

Coates does a great job, again, as Declan.  He has an expressive face, and a voice that does it just the right with intonations and inflections in every scene he's in, as a player and a voice-over narrator.  It's not easy to be original in a mob story, it's such well trodden ground, but Bad Blood 2 amply does that and his highly recommended.

See also Bad Blood: New Mob

 
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Luther 5.1: Back in Fine, Depraved Form

Luther was back for its fifth season on BBC America last night.  First and foremost, it stars Idris Elba in the title role, one of my all-time favorite actors since I first saw him in The Wire as Stringer Bell, second-in-command in a drug empire, so erudite he was studying economics in night school and quoting Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.

The Luther character is a detective genius who has been through the mill in his personal and professional life, which often are the same and almost always intertwined.  As the trailer for this season aptly shows, Luther's wife and young partner were both murdered in previous seasons.   In the first episode of season 5, Luther continues to take a physical pounding, from the likes of a crime boss we saw in fine crafty and brutal form last season, but the apex case is a sadistic serial killer who's getting more frequent and gruesome in his killings.

Luther's opponent here is not just the serial killer, but a shrink, Vivien Lake (played by Hermione Norris, who was so good as Ros on MI5).  Lake is understandably protecting the serial killer, Jeremy, from the police. He's not Lake's patient but her husband, and likely her partner in sexual kinkiness, which may or may not extend to the killings.   At very least, Lake sacrifices one of her troubled patients, James, setting him up to take the fall for the recent spate of murders that presumably her husband committed.   James commits suicide before the police can nab him, but the case isn't closed.  Luther's new partner, Catherine Halliday, shows her mettle and realizes something is not adding up with James as the killer.

So Luther's faced with the fine kettle of depraved fish we've come to expect on this series.  But the knock on his door in the last scene was better than icing the on cake.  It was from Alice, back from the dead, played by the inimitable Ruth Wilson, back from our side of the Atlantic in The Affair.

See also Luther: Between the Wire and the Shield ... Luther 3.1: Into the Blender ... Luther 3.2: Success ... Luther 3.3: The Perils of Being an Enemy ... Luther 3.4: Go Ask Alice

 
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Luther 5: Back in Fine, Depraved Form

Luther was back for its fifth season on BBC America last night.  First and foremost, it stars Idris Elba in the title role, one of my all-time favorite actors since I first saw him in The Wire as Stringer Bell, second-in-command in a drug empire, so erudite he was studying economics in night school and quoting Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.

The Luther character is a detective genius who has been through the mill in his personal and professional life, which often are the same and almost always intertwined.  As the trailer for this season aptly shows, Luther's wife and young partner were both murdered in previous seasons.   In the first episode of season 5, Luther continues to take a physical pounding, from the likes of a crime boss we saw in fine crafty and brutal form last season, but the apex case is a sadistic serial killer who's getting more frequent and gruesome in his killings.

Luther's opponent here is not just the serial killer, but a shrink, Vivien Lake (played by Hermione Norris, who was so good as Ros on MI5).  Lake is understandably protecting the serial killer, Jeremy, from the police. He's not Lake's patient but her husband, and likely her partner in sexual kinkiness, which may or may not extend to the killings.   At very least, Lake sacrifices one of her troubled patients, James, setting him up to take the fall for the recent spate of murders that presumably her husband committed.   James commits suicide before the police can nab him, but the case isn't closed.  Luther's new partner, Catherine Halliday, shows her mettle and realizes something is not adding up with James as the killer.

So Luther's faced with the fine kettle of depraved fish we've come to expect on this series.  But the knock on his door in the last scene was better than icing the on cake.  It was from Alice, back from the dead, played by the inimitable Ruth Wilson, back from our side of the Atlantic in The Affair.

See also Luther: Between the Wire and the Shield ... Luther 3.1: Into the Blender ... Luther 3.2: Success ... Luther 3.3: The Perils of Being an Enemy ... Luther 3.4: Go Ask Alice

 
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Chernobyl 1.4: "Bio-Robots"

When Shcherbina and Legasov discover that the Soviet robots designed to move on the Moon couldn't do the job of cleaning up the worst of the rubble at Chernobyl - because the high radiation fried the robot circuity - Legasov suggests "bio-robots," a clever name for human beings.

This was the highpoint of Chernobyl 1.4 - high in the sense that at least it got the job done, though who knows how many of the soldiers died, sooner or later after their work.  In contrast, the slaughter of animals in the radioactive zone was nothing but horrible.   As was the story of the firefighter's wife, who survived the radiation only because her unborn child absorbed it, and died hours after birth.

On the fate of the dogs and cats in the "exclusion" i.e. evacuated because lethally radiated zone, it's worth mentioning the discovery early this year that wildlife is thriving now, in 2019, in that same zone. As one wit and scientist observed, apparently humans were more injurious to animal life than has been the radiation from Chernobyl.

And the true villains in this harrowing, sobering docu-drama are human beings not atoms.  Humans who thought splitting the atom could be safely harnessed to make energy in the first place.  Humans, more specifically the KGB, who covered up a flaw or problem with the Chernobyl type of reactor back in the 1970s, a decade before the explosion, when a similar reactor exhibited the bizarre, counter-intuitive effect of superheating immediately after it was shut down.  As Shcherbina observed, the public relations of the Soviet state, the maintenance of the myth of Soviet superiority, came before disseminating information about this effect, information which could have prevented Chernobyl.

But lest we think that only the Soviet Union was afflicted with placing image before safety, this is something that most nations and institutions can suffer from.   Next week, in the finale of this important docu-drama, we'll learn how our principals were able to get at least some of the truth out to the world.

See also: Chernobyl 1.1: The Errors of Arrogance ... Chernobyl 1.2: The Horror Movie ... Chernobyl 1.3: The Reasons

 

Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Killing Eve Season 2 Finale: Possibilities after the End

[spoilers]

Well, the ending of the second season of Killing Eve, on the Beeb tonight, was true to the series name.  Villanelle shoots Eve, who lies on street, apparently dead.   Except, that can't be true, because Killing Eve has been renewed for a third season.  So maybe Eve is lying on the street in the other meaning - meaning, she's fibbing, or the scene is not telling us the truth.

Here, then, are the possibilities:

1.  Eve is indeed dead, and we'll be seeing her next season in flashbacks, or via a heretofore unknown twin.  Nah, all of that is way too trite.

2. Villanelle deliberately grazed Eve.  She's unconscious but not badly wounded, certainly not dead.

3. Villanelle tried to kill Eve but her aim was a little off, because love and disappointment clouded her vision.  Eve's unconscious but not badly wounded, certainly not dead.

4. Eve's not even unconscious.  Villanelle missed completely, and Eve is pretending to be dead, hoping/betting that Eve doesn't send another bullet her way.

4a.  Villanelle missed deliberately.  She was just trying to make a psychological point.

4b.  Villanelle missed because her aim was a lot off.  See #3 above for the rest of this.

5.  The BBC was lying when they announced that Killing Eve had been renewed.  Nah, that's ridiculous.

So the truth of what we saw tonight, to be brought out in the open in Season 3, resides somewhere from #2 to #4a.   I'll see you here next year with more.

See also Killing Eve 2.1: Libido and Thanatos ... Killing Eve 2.2: Villanelle as Victim ... Killing Eve 2.3 Lipstick ... Killing Eve 2.6: Billie ... Killing Eve 2.7: Death and Sex

And see also Killing Eve: Highly Recommended (Season 1)


Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Sneaky Pete Season 3: Better than Ever

Sneaky Pete rolled out is third season on Amazon Prime earlier this month, and I enjoyed it even more than I did the first two.  Which is saying a lot, since the first two were full of quirk and jive and action.   I can't quite recall if there ever was a television series about a con man like Sneaky Pete - maybe Maverick is a distant cousin - but Sneaky Pete did it better than anything I've ever seen on television.   And the third season did it more, adding subplots, locations, characters, and action.

The basic story, if you haven't seen it (and the rest of this review will have some spoilers), is that a con man, Marius, takes on the identity of his cellmate, Pete, when Marius is released from prison.  Taking on Pete's identity entails Marius showing up at Pete's family home, where his grandparents live.  Marius knows that the family hasn't seen Pete in years.  But, actually, the two don't look all that similar, and it's a tough sell for the viewer to believe that Marius is able to pull this off.  But part of the charm of this series is that you can almost pretty much believe that he does.

The tension of Pete continuing to fool most of his adoptive family is the centerpiece of the story, the tableau on which the various cons that Marius is enacted are played out.  Indeed, the reason he assumed this identity had to do with a major con.  In the third season, new cons are introduced, involving art forgery and wine, and these played out on the East Coast, where the series originated, and in California, where the series takes up residence.  Although a key member of Marius's conned family - Julia - discovers in the second season that Marius isn't Pete, he continues to grow so close to the family that in the third season he risks cons and alliances to save Julia.   He's in fact a mensch, a decent person deep down, and he's grown to love the family he's been lying to through his teeth.  And they love him, too.  One of the most moving moments in Season 3 is when Grandpa (Peter Gerety) sincerely says to "Pete": "you're a good boy".

One of the great things about Sneaky Pete is how even the secondary characters are real characters (you know what I mean) and memorable.   In the third season, these secondary characters increase in number are so compelling as to be raised to a state of art.  There are so many of them that I'm too lazy to list them all right here.  As for the central characters, Giovanni Ribisi as Marius is superb, and Margo Martindale and Peter Gerety as his "grandparents" are off the charts.   Perfect binging after a day at the beach or the lake or wherever during the summer.

See also Sneaky Pete: True Win (review of season 1) ... Sneaky Pete Season 2: Excellent, Beats the First (Slightly)

Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Fix Ends: In Need of One

Since I reviewed the first episode of The Fix back in March, I figured the least I could do is come back with a few words now that the series has ended, apparently for good.

And actually, that's a good play on words: The Fix has not only ended, as in not being renewed, it's a good thing that it ended.  And not because it told such a great story that it ended in just the right place.   No, The Fix told a story that what was at best ok, and often was a jumbled, cheap soap opera.

I suppose you could say that being an alternate history of the O.J. and Marcia Clark story - that is, a story in which an ADA who unsuccessfully prosecuted a famous guy accused of murdering his wife and someone else, gets a second chance when the murderer is accused of killing his new girlfriend - I suppose you could say that the narrative was bound to be cheap and lurid, since that typified so much of the O.J. trial.   But, I don't know, I'd say that would be too generous a framing for The Fix.

As it is, I thought the plot did have some good surprises and turns - that's what I meant when I said it was ok - and the acting, especially the guy from Lost (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who played Sevvy the O.J.  character, was sometimes compelling and always adequate.   But there were also some downright clunkers in the story, including Sevvy's first wife (played by Robin Givens) and the cowboy that Maya (the Marcia Clark character, played by Robin Tunney) loves, who was boringly obvious.  Back on the bright side, it was good to see Alias's Merrin Dungey on the screen again, but I did guess the ending halfway or sooner through the finale.

All in all, I don't deeply regret watching the whole season of The Fix, but chances are I wouldn't of continued watching it had it been renewed.

See also The Fix 1.1: Alternate History O.J.

 
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Red Line Finale: Realism and Optimism

As I've said before in my review of The Red Line, I give CBS-TV a lot of credit for airing this sensitive and important mini-series.  It's the kind of series you'd expect to find on cable or streaming, and its presence on an old, traditional network at once tells us that this network isn't so old or traditional, after all.

[spoilers follow] ....


The ending was realistic and optimistic, a tough combination to find anywhere these days.  The cop, Paul Evans, gets off without a grand jury indictment, which still happens all too often when a white cop is caught on video killing a black man, without justification.  In other words, murdering him.

But Tia wins the election as Alderman.   Even though the corrupt DA also wins.  And, in the end, Evans resigns.  He recognizes that he's racist.  That's progress and optimistic indeed.

The gay thread of this vivid drama was handled very well, too.  Jira's biological father has found her, and that's heart-warming.  But he also found God, years ago, and his devout beliefs tell him a man and a man being husband and husband is wrong.  Jira, as much as she wants a relationship with her biological father, tells him to leave.  All of this is very realistic.

I know The Red Line is billed as a mini-series, but I would tune in immediately if there was a sequel.  And there's ample room for that.  I want to see how Tia does in office.  I want to see how Daniel does with Liam.  And speaking of Daniel - if Noah Wyle doesn't at least get nominated for an Emmy, I'll be stunned.  And, though there have been lots of other strong male performances in short series, I'd say he has a strong chance of winning, as well.

 See also The Red Line 1.1-4: Bursting with Crucial Lessons for Our Age

Videos in which I talk about Black Lives Matter:  here and here

 


Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music